(28-05-2019, 12:41 PM)Torsten wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know about such an argumentation. Which statement are you referring to?In the conclusion : "Why are we then convinced that the hoax hypothesis can be the only correct interpretation of the VMS?" A cipher, significantly more complex than mono-alphabetic substitution is ruled out only because of "the historical context" (1). Steganography is "not totally dismissed" but "compelling arguments against it do exist". The arguments being a rhetorical question "Why, e.g., would someone hide a genuine secret within an obviously “suspicious” book?" (2) and "high regularities of the VMS text significantly limit the maximal amount of information possibly hidden within the “container”, virtually rendering it useless." (3)
1) Fair enough but the ink is not dated and it is not unconceivable that a more complex cipher was invented or derived from an existing cipher, known since antiquity, just once. A cipher/steganography/abbreviation hybrid could be designed to cover a wide range of ciphertext:plaintext ratios for variety and increased security. (I have such a system in mind, yet unpublished.)
2) They certainly tried hard to make it look mostly like a normal European 15th century manuscript (illustrations, glyphs imitating common Latin abbreviations) so it does not look suspicious at first glance, not any more than any manuscript written in an unknown foreign language and script. Only those who had studied all existing languages and scripts would have found it suspicious, and not many people had such an encyclopedic knowledge.
3) Useless is a (too) strong word. Someone willing to write dy nearly 7000 times, and other common patterns, instead of abbreviating them to a single glyph obviously did not care much about the amount of information that they can fit on a page.